Chatbots are now able to engage in sophisticated conversations with consumers in the domain of relationships, providing a potential coping solution to widescale societal loneliness. Behavioral research provides little insight into whether these applications are effective at alleviating loneliness. We address this question by focusing on “AI companions”: applications designed to provide consumers with synthetic interaction partners. Studies 1 and 2 find suggestive evidence that consumers use AI companions to alleviate loneliness, by employing a novel methodology for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to detect loneliness in conversations and reviews.Study 3 finds that AI companions successfully alleviateloneliness on par only with interacting with another person, and more than other activities such watching YouTube videos. Moreover,consumers underestimate the degree to which AI companions improve their loneliness. Study 4 uses a longitudinal design and finds that an AI companion consistently reduces loneliness over the course of a week. Study 5 provides evidence that both the chatbots’ performance and, especially, whether it makes users feel heard, explain reductions in loneliness. Study 6 provides an additional robustness check for the loneliness-alleviating benefits of AI companions.
